Steve Bishop: 3 Films About Buildings

The Towada Art Center is pleased to present Steve Bishop’s first solo museum exhibition in Asia from Saturday, December 5, 2026, to Wednesday, March 31, 2027.

In recent years, the presence of uninhabited buildings, including long-abandoned houses, investment properties, and second homes, has become a serious social issue not only in Japan but around the world.

Here in Towada City—long renowned as a horse-breeding region that further developed into a “horse town” in modern times with the establishment of the Army Horse Supply Department—the number of unoccupied buildings is also increasing against the backdrop of a declining population. In addition, relocations resulting from the 2001 Central Government Reform left behind numerous vacant plots [1]. Towada Art Center (TAC) was established as part of a policy initiative to address this urban core context.

This exhibition brings together three videos by London-based artist Steve Bishop, each taking a group of buildings as its subject and exploring the distance between a building and the lives it is supposed to hold: a concern that resonates strongly with Towada’s own situation.

Marking Bishop’s first solo museum exhibition in Asia, the exhibition features the world premiere of his newest work, Stolen From The People (2026), set in a deserted village in southern England where all residents were forcibly evicted by the military during the Second World War. It also presents The Caretaker (2018), which documents a small town in northern Canada that continues to be maintained even after all residents departed following a nearby mine closure, and Meanwhile… (2008), which reconfigures New York City b-roll that 1990s American sitcoms used to establish where their characters lived [2]. The programmes themselves were filmed in Los Angeles, meaning that the arbitrary buildings depicted in Meanwhile… stand in for homes that never existed.

TAC is distinguished by its “houses for art” configuration, in which stand-alone galleries each display a single work, and this exhibition similarly presents one video in each gallery. In these spaces, large and small, people move around the works every day, viewing, invigilating, cleaning and repairing. The same quiet labour runs through Bishop’s films: a caretaker maintaining a town where no one lives, volunteers keeping a village church consecrated within a military training area. A building endures only for as long as someone keeps attending to it.

Seen alongside a museum built on ground that had fallen empty, the videos invite reflection on the relationship between land, buildings and people, and on what it takes to hold a community together.

[1] Central Government Reform: An administrative overhaul implemented in 2001 that restructured 1 Office and 22 Ministries/Agencies down to 1 Office and 12 Ministries/Agencies to improve efficiency. In Towada City, the consolidation and relocation of local branch offices of government agencies resulted in vacant plots along Kanchogai-dori, making the revitalisation of the town centre an urgent challenge.
[2] Sitcom (Situation Comedy): A genre of narrative comedy originating in the United States, typically set in fixed rooms or spaces, revolving around the everyday conversations and events of a regular cast of characters. Representative works include Friends.